288 
ANIMAL INTELLIGENT!'. 
me by correspondents, similarly relating to individual vari- 
ations of the ancestral instinct of incubation in order to 
meet the requirements of a novel environment. Thus 
Mr. J. F. Fisher tells me that while he was a commander 
in the East India trade he always took a quantity of fowls 
to sea for food. The laying-boxes being in a confined 
space, the hens used to quarrel over their occupancy ; and 
one of the hens adopted the habit of removing the 6 nest- 
eggs ’ which Mr. Fisher placed in one of the boxes to 
another box of the same kind not very far away. He 
watched the process through a chink of a door, and c saw 
her curl her neck round the egg, thus forming a cup by 
which she lifted the egg,’ and conveyed it to the other 
box. He adds : — • 
I can give no information as to the more recondite question 
why the egg was removed, or the fastidious preference of the 
one box over the other, or the inventive faculty that suggested 
the neck as a makeshift hand ; but from the despatch wit h 
which she effected the removal of the egg in the case I saw, I 
have no doubt that this hen was the one which had performed 
the feat so often before. 
The explanation of the preference shown for the one 
box over the other may, I think, be gathered from another 
part of my correspondent’s letter, for he there mentions 
incidentally that the box in which he placed the nest-egg, 
and from which the hen removed it, w T as standing near a 
door which was usually open, and thus situated in a more 
exposed position than the other box. But be this as it 
may, considering that among domestic fowls the habit of 
conveying eggs is not usual, such isolated cases are inte- 
resting as showing how instincts may originate. Jesse 
gives an exactly similar case ( 6 Gleanings,’ vol. i., p. 149) 
of the Cape goose, which removed eggs from a nest at- 
tacked by rats, and another case of a wild duck doing the 
same. 
In the same connection, and with the same remarks, I 
may quote the following case in which a fowl adopted the 
habit of conveying, not her eggs, but her young chickens. 
I quote it from Houzeau (‘ Journ,,’ i, p. 332), who gives 
